Recently bought Crystal an HP Mini 1000. I bought it from uBid.com for a really good price. When I first got it, I put OS X on it to see how it worked. For the most part, it worked fine. Just some issues here and there but if you had a screen that was bigger than 568px, you would not be able to see it. Also, there were issues when you put the laptop to sleep. Lost bluetooth and wireless. Crystal was not going to go for that, so I reformatted and put Windows XP back on it. So far, it has lived up to its expecitations. She mainly uses it for Email, Facebook and web surfing. It came with 1 GB of memory and a 2 GB stick would only cost about $20. If she complains about the speed, I will just buy the new stick. Well this post is really for the modifications I have made to the netbook so far. I have put in bluetooth usb and working on getting WWAN setup on it. A good place to go for information on how to do a lot of different hacks can be found on MyHPMini.com.

The laptop has an option for bluetooth, but this one did not come with one. There is a plug right next to the WWAN card. At work we have HP 6530b laptops with bluetooth modules in them. I check and the cable is the same for both laptops. So I removed the assembly from the 6530b laptop and put it into the Mini. The Mini did see that something was connected to the USB hub, but I could not get the drivers loaded for it. I tried the Mini bluetooth drivers and even the 6530b bluetooth drivers. No go. So I saw that there was a USB plug next to the SSD hard drive. HP uses it for their HP Mini Mobile Drive. Since I didn’t plan on using it for that, I ended up going to Fry’s Electronics and buying a micro bluetooth module. It fit perfectly in the USB slot. Now we have an internal bluetooth module. Total cost of mod : $19.99

Now for the WWAN card. Once I found out that there was a WWAN card slot in the Mini, I just had to try and get it to work. First was to get a WWAN card. At work we use the AT&T USBConnect 881. It just happened that one of the devices was broken. I borrowed the card to see if I could salvage the WWAN card inside it. After taking it apart and checking things out, I found out that the USB part of the module was broken, but the WWAN card was still good. So now I had a free WWAN card (Sierra Wireless MC8781) as they were going to throw it away. Next I had to update the HP Mini BIOS to allow me to use this card. I got a custom bios from this thread. It by passes the check that allows only certain cards so you can use this with any miniPci WWAN cards. It’s a couple of pages in so you can download it from here instead. Once I updated the bios, I took apart the laptop again to get to the miniPci slot. Put the card in and booted it up. Once I got into windows, the card created a CD drive on the netbook and loaded up the install softward for the card. I installed it and was able to load the drivers for the card. The next thing to do was install the generic HP Connect software so that I can enable the card. Now the card will always say that it has been disabled from the Device Manager, but it is on. I guess there is no way around this for now, but if you start the AT&T Communication Manager, it will find the card. Now we get to where I am today. I needed to get an antenna that will work with the card as there is not one currently in the laptop. There are some suggestions on the forum thread I linked to above, but not one post or pictures on what really works. So the next post will talk about what I have done to try and get it to work.